11-13 May 2018, Gregynog Hall

The Thirtieth Annual Conference
of the Association for Welsh Writing in English

Keynote Speakers

Creative Keynote Speaker: Alys Conran, winner of the 2017 Wales Book of the Year for Pigeon

The final keynote will be announced shortly: please visit the AWWE website for latest updates.

Call for Papers

​“‘Home’. When you say a word slowly it can seem suddenly strange. ‘Home’. Is that really how you spell it? And what does it mean? ‘Hoam’. ‘Hohm’.” – John Barnie, Footfalls in the Silence: A Memoir (2014)

Our thirtieth anniversary conference will ask what ‘home’ means within the context of the English-language literary traditions of Wales. In his 1977 volume Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan suggested that home is ‘the focal point of a cosmic structure’, and argued that ‘Human groups nearly everywhere tend to regard their own homeland as the center of the world.’ More recently, Michael Allen Fox has proposed that ‘Self and home are inseparable elements, with each depending on the other for its existence and properties.’ He has also emphasised concepts of familiarity and belonging: ‘In English, “home” stands for a place of residence, belonging, and attachment’ and is bound up with ideas of ‘familiarity, attraction, warmth of feeling, pride, a special sense of bonding’. The primary emotional content of home has similarly been articulated by Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling who note that home is not just a ‘site’, but is crucially ‘an idea and an imaginary imbued with feelings’.

University of Edinburgh 13-14 July 2017,

with an associated event at Little Sparta, 15 July

This two-day symposium will explore new critical and interdisciplinary perspectives on the Scottish poet, artist and avant-gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). As Finlay’s reputation worldwide continues to grow a decade after his death, we wish to ask searching questions about the boundaries of his practice, its philosophical, political and cultural dimensions, and its legacies and affinities across a range of media, disciplines and geographical boundaries. A number of attendees will also have the chance to visit Finlay’s poet’s garden at Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills for an event in its new workshop space.

West of England and South Wales Women’s History Network, held in conjunction with Llafur (The Welsh People’s History Society)

24th Annual Conference

Saturday 1st July 2017
10.am to 5.pm
Aberdare, South Wales

Papers are invited on any aspect of women’s involvement in the labour movement in Britain 1880-1950. A regional focus, in particular on South Wales and the West of England, would be very welcome, although not essential.

Keynote Speakers

Stephanie Ward, Cardiff University will speak on emotions and working class women’s political activism

Karen Hunt, Keele University, will speak on labour and the housewife

Themes/ topics could include:

Organising separately (LP women’s sections)

Emotions and labour politics

Women’s Cooperative Guild

The Labour Party and the ‘housewife’

Organising in the community

Women and the labour/socialist press

Campaigning issues Individual women as activists and elected office holders

Proposals for 20 minute papers of not more than 500 words should be sent to

Nottingham Trent University

3 April 2017

Keynote speaker:

Professor Gregory Woods (Nottingham Trent University)

‘Somewhat like Ariel / Somewhat like Puck / Somewhat like a gutter boy / Who loves to play in muck’ – Richard Bruce Nugent

Queer Modernism(s) is an interdisciplinary conference that aims to explore the place of queer identity in modernist art, literature and culture. How do modernist artists frame queerness within their work? How did writers reveal and conceal their sexuality? And, in ‘making it new’, how did modernism develop new modes of exploring gender and sexuality?

University of Birmingham

June 29-July 1, 2017

Keynote speakers:

Claire Colebrook (Penn State University)

Janet Wolff (University of Manchester)

“Only to the person who is prepared to lose her life in its known form will life appear in its new guises of ever-greater beauty and perfection. But in order to achieve such a position, silence must be reached in both thinking and feeling. This is losing life, for life is, first and foremost, pervaded by human thoughts and feelings in a universal and common form.”

—Hilma af Klint

Modernist Life is an international, interdisciplinary conference that aims to explore the range, depth and prolongation of modernisms from the nineteenth century into the present moment and the future. It takes as its starting point the fundamental tension between art and life, central to modernism, but also the lifespan of modernism itself – beginnings, endings, or alternatively modernism’s longue durée. The conference invites discussion of the ways in which modernisms negotiate the concept of life, afterlife and still life, or death; it is interested in the cultivation of life (the ecological) and the extension or replacement of life (the technological); and it seeks to debate the ways in which modernism’s lives are preserved or reconstructed, through biography, editing, citation, education, cultural institutions and the new technologies of the archive.

The Second Modernist Network Cymru Conference

The Drwm, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth &

The School of Art, Aberystwyth University

12 – 13 September 2017

Keynote speaker

Professor Tony Brown (Bangor University)

UPDATE 01/02/2017: The deadline for proposals for the Second MONC Conference has been extended until Friday, 24 February. Many thanks to all those who have submitted proposals so far.

Call For Papers

Few texts have combined word and image in a more striking or influential manner than Alfred Barr’s timeline of modern art. The chart first appeared on the front cover of the 1936 exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; through Barr’s direction, MOMA helped to establish the narrative for artistic modernism in the 1930s. This picture has since become one of the most widely-reproduced images of modern art in the western world, one which continues to shape our understanding of modernist art history today.

For its second conference, organised in conjunction with Aberystwyth University’s David Jones Centre for Word and Image, the National Library of Wales and the Aberystwyth School of Art, Modernist Network Cymru (MONC) aims to interrogate the symbiotic relationship between the visual arts and the written word, as encapsulated in Barr’s iconic image. How did modernist artists respond to literary texts? How did writers incorporate visual elements in poetry and prose? How did author and artist collaborations arise? And how did modernist texts, from collages to magazines to scrapbooks, combine word and image in radical new ways?